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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I agree that even adaptation can be successfully adapted to by an adversary. My claim is merely that adaptive agents (e.g. consequentialists) will eventually outcompete agents that operate according to fixed rules (consequentialists). In your example, the adversaries are adaptive. If they followed fixed rules, they would be poor adversaries.

I think there are probably environments where consequentialists outcompete deontologists (specifically ones where the effects of your actions fall within a known and at least somewhat predictable distribution), and other environments where deontologists outcompete consequentialists (the ones where certain actions are on average good given certain observations, or where acting predictably leads to good outcomes). And there are yet other environments where having a policy of blindly doing things similar to ones that have worked in the past will outperform both of those principled approaches.

And then there are adversarial environments where there may not even be a single strategy that dominates all other strategies within that environment (e.g. you may have a situation with policies A, B, and C, where A > B, B > C, C > A, or even more cursed scenarios where how well a strategy does depends on how many other players are playing that strategy).

My point is not "deontology > consequentialism", it's "whether a strategy is useful depends on the environment, and consequentialism-in-practice is not the most useful strategy across all environments".